Each silently reconstructed Delight's life, now linking it with its
ancestry and its romantic beginnings. She had, then, sprung from
aristocratic stock; riches had been her right, and culture her
heritage. She had been the single flower of a passionate love, and the
hot-headed young father to whom she had been bequeathed when bereft of
the woman he had adored had taken her with him when he had sought the
sea's balm to assuage his sorrow. She was all that remained of that
tender, throbbing memory of his youth. Where he went she followed, all
unconscious of peril and with youth's God-given faith; and when the
great moment came and the supreme sacrifice was demanded, the man
voluntarily severed the bonds that bound them, leaving her to life
while he himself went forth into the Beyond. What must not that heroic
soul have suffered when he cast his child into the ocean's arms and
upon the mercies of an unknown future! What blind trust led him; what
unselfishness and courage lay in the choice he made! A smaller mind
would have followed the easier path and kept them united to the end,
happy in the thought that in their death they were not divided, and
that no years stretched ahead when she would be without his protection.
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